Month: November 2015

Karen Korematsu, daughter of Fred Korematsu, speaks after the re-enactment of the Fred Korematsu case on September 18, 2015, at the Federal Courthouse of Minneapolis. (Photo by Allan Block)

One of the darkest moments in United States history for the executive and judicial branches was the promulgation of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the military to “exclude” Japanese Americans from “military areas.” More than 110,000 Japanese Americans – more than 60 percent of whom were American citizens – were placed in internment camps located in seven states. The United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the executive order and incarceration in United States v. Korematsu an opinion issued December 18, 1944. (Justices Jackson, Murphy and Roberts dissented.)

The plaintiff in the case was Fred Korematsu who was 23 years old at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Fred was a Nisei – second generation Japanese American. He was born in Oakland, third of four brothers. His parents owned a flower nursery. Fred was a welder in a shipyard in May 1942 when he refused to report to an assembly center per Executive Order 9066. Fred was convicted in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California of “remaining in the prohibited area after the evacuation deadline.” Fred’s appeal ultimately reached the Supreme Court. According to Fred’s daughter Karen Korematsu – the executive director of the Fred Korematsu Foundation – Fred pursued his case because he was an American citizen and believed his incarceration was wrong.

In 2006, the National Association of Women Lawyers issued its NAWL Challenge: Increase the number of women equity partners, women chief legal officers, and women tenured law professors to at least 30 percent by 2015. As reported in the First Annual NAWL Survey, “The impetus for the Survey grew from the now familiar ‘50/15/15’ conundrum: For over 15 years, 50 percent of law school graduates have been women yet for a number of years, only about 15 percent of law firm equity partners and chief legal officers have been women.”

Like this:

“My team didn’t even have to play to win the championship, lean back.” – Fat Joe

Alabama Coach Nick Saban

The first College Football Playoff Ranking was announced this week and of course it’s a little controversial. This is what makes sports so fun, we can talk incessantly about it and there is no bulletproof logic or absolute truth.

The college football ranking is just as much an art as a science. It was ultimately compiled by the Selection Committee using statistics, polls, and like anything else, some bias. The committee has stated that it doesn’t look at what might happen, rather, it analyzes what has happened. In other words, the initial college football ranking is meant to measure a team’s performance over its potential.

But has the Committee let confirmation bias cloud their judgment? In other words, did the Committee’s choice of Alabama in the initial ranking because it presumptively believed it would be in the final ranking ultimately create an unfair playing field?